Virginia Kwan

Arizona State University | ASU · Department of Psychology

Psychologists and philosophers have argued that a consistent self-concept is essential for mental health and well-being. Differences in individuals’ backgrounds—specifically, their financial resources—may be instrumental to understanding these relationships. This research: (1) tested the continuity of self-perceptions, (2) investigated if perceptio...

Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic changed lives overnight. With the pandemic's abrupt spread, graduating college students encountered widespread setbacks and challenges and were left with considerable uncertainty about how long the pandemic would last. This research explored the relationship between anticipation of the pandemic's length and longi...

Graduating during COVID‐19, the Class of 2020 had difficulty pursuing their future goals. This research examined the likelihood of academic and career goal change early in the pandemic, disparities in persistence by socioeconomic status (SES), and how psychological resources mitigated goal change during the early stages of the pandemic. This 4‐year...

Prior studies found that the Big Five personality traits are significant predictors of social media outcomes, but they did not specify the situational context of the Big Five. The assumption is that people have the same personality on social media as offline. The present research addressed whether the Big Five are the same on social media as offlin...

This research followed students over their first 2 years of college. During this time, many students lose sight of their goals, leading to poor academic performance and leaving STEM and business majors. This research was the first to examine longitudinal changes in future vividness, how those changes impact academic success, and identify sex differ...

Despite widespread concerns with social networking site (SNS) security, little research has determined why some are more concerned about SNS security than others. The present research proposes that people may derive their sense of security in SNSs from how safe they are and feel in their physical environment. Specifically, this research examined th...

Past research has found notable gender differences in the Big Five personality and that these differences may arise from cultural and ecological contexts. Social media has become part of everyday life with people constantly switching between social media and offline contexts. The present research addressed whether gender differences in the Big Five...

People encounter intertemporal decisions every day and often engage in behaviors that are not good for their future. One factor that may explain these decisions is the perception of their distal future self. An emerging body of research suggests that individuals vary in how they perceive their future self and many perceive their future self as a di...

As a result of increasing globalization, people are exposed to an even greater extent to other cultures, making it possible for individuals to assimilate mindsets that are typical of another culture. Recent work on extracultural cognition has shown that immediate cultural contexts exert powerful influences on cognition and behavioral patterns. This...

The current study examines hacktivism (i.e., hacking to convey a moral, ethical, or social justice message) through a general game theoretic framework-that is, as a product of costs and benefits. Given the inherent risk of carrying out a hacktivist attack (e.g., legal action, imprisonment), it would be rational for the user to weigh these risks aga...

As technology's presence grows increasingly concrete in global societies, so too do our relationships with the devices we keep close at hand from day to day. Whereas research has, in the past, framed smartphone addiction in terms of possessional attachment, the present research hypothesizes that anxious smartphone attachment stems from human attach...

Women are more likely to leave science, technology, engineering, and mathematics compared to men, in part because they lack similar role models such as peers, teaching assistants, and instructors. We examined the effect of a brief, scalable online intervention that consisted of a letter from a female role model who normalized concerns about belongi...

This special issue of Group Processes and Intergroup Relations presents new theory and research on how group processes influence, maintain, and overcome health disparities. We present eight papers that document the causes and consequences of health disparities from the perspective of stigmatized and disadvantaged groups, health care providers, and...

Shteynberg (this issue) reviews how group attention increases the psychological prominence of the information observed in group settings, serves to better embed descriptive norms making them more dominant in people’s cognitions, and acts as an axis of group communication and cooperation. We find the research on group attention compelling and an int...

The issue of Americans' levels of narcissism is subject to lively debate. The focus of the present research is on the perception of national character (PNC) of Americans as a group. In Study 1, American adults (N 100) rated Americans as significantly more narcissistic than they perceived themselves and acquaintances. In Study 2, this finding was re...

This essay synthesizes scientific research across two decades on the influence of cyberlife engagement on cognitive processes, mental and physical health, and interpersonal interactions, highlighting the increasingly pervasive presence of digital innovation in society. New possibilities afforded by the integration of technology in commerce, relatio...

While expert groups often make recommendations on a range of non-controversial as well as controversial issues, little is known about how the level of expert consensus-the level of expert agreement-influences perceptions of the recommendations. This research illustrates that for non-controversial issues expert groups that exhibit high levels of agr...

Objective: Large ethnic disparities exist in health outcomes, yet little is known about the psychological mechanisms that underlie these differences. We propose that a key to understanding ethnic minority health is to recognize the cultural factors that influence perceived vulnerability to disease (PVD), specifically ethnicity and ethnic identifica...

The present research investigates the effects of a subtle essentialist cue: restricting individuals to identify with only one ethnicity. Although this constraint is mundane and commonly used in everyday life, it sends a message of essentialized group differences. Three studies illustrate the harmful impact of this essentialist cue on diversity. Stu...

Recent evidence suggests the existence of a human behavioral immune system that helps identify and minimize exposure to disease threats. Although past research has identified a number of physical and visual cues that can activate the behavioral immune system, in the current investigation, we explore the possibility that this system can be triggered...

Recent advances in medicine and technology have helped people live longer, safer lives in an ever-expanding global community. Yet, with these advances has come a new set of challenges. Rather than facing local, perceptible threats, such as animal predators, humans must now overcome global, often unseen, challenges, such as viral pandemics, nuclear...

Objective: By 2014, over 30 million Americans currently lacking health insurance will be able to access health services. While enhancing accessibility to healthcare is a significant step towards reducing health disparities, it is unclear whether access to health services will result in utilization of such services. Previous studies demonstrate that...

Findings of recent studies of rank-order consistency and of normative change on personality inventories in cross-sectional and longitudinal samples support the notion that personality helps the individual adapt to changes across the life span and changes in the process. Rank-order consistency does not peak until late middle age and is never complet...

Scholars of fields as diverse as biology, psychology, philosophy, anthropology, and theology have sought to achieve a greater understanding of the nature of the self. Since its first appearance in psychology, the self has become the most studied topic in Western research on psychology. One of the central issues this article addresses is, 'What do w...

Using large Internet samples, we examined the possible influence of sociodemographic factors on the Chinese self-concept and in particular, on the level of narcissism. We found that (i) younger persons are more narcissistic than older ones; (ii) persons from higher socioeconomic classes are more narcissistic than those from lower socioeconomic clas...

People are quick to perceive meaningful patterns in the co-occurrence of events. We report two studies exploring the effects of streaks in symptom checklists on perceived personal disease risk. In the context of these studies, a streak is a sequence of consecutive items on a list that share the characteristic of being either general or specific. We...

Cancer therapy selects for cancer cells resistant to treatment, a process that is fundamentally evolutionary. To what extent, however, is the evolutionary perspective employed in research on therapeutic resistance and relapse? We analyzed 6,228 papers on therapeutic resistance and/or relapse in cancers and found that the use of evolution terms in a...

Mexican immigration to the United States comprises an important social issue in contemporary public policy debate, particularly given the recent passage of Arizona's Senate Bill 1070 (SB 1070). The current study investigated how individuals’ sentiments toward undocumented Mexican immigrants shifted between 2006 and 2009 in Arizona, and also examine...

In this paper, we review the recent literature on the debate over the value of self-enhancement. Past studies fall into two distinct sets, each in the context of a different research tradition. The componential approach to self-enhancement integrates these two divergent perspectives and takes seriously the interplay of self-perception and interpers...

Neoplastic progression is an evolutionary process and cancer prevention is successful to the extent that it can impact that process, reducing the likelihood that premalignant cells will evolve invasive or metastatic phenotypes. Despite the centrality of somatic evolution in cancer progression, evolutionary tools and analyses have rarely been applie...

The tendency to claim more knowledge than one actually has is common and well documented; however, little research has focused on the neural mechanisms that underlie this phenomenon. The goal of the present study was to investigate the cortical correlates of overclaiming. Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) was delivered to the medial prefronta...

Anthropomorphism is the attribution of humanlike characteristics to real or imagined nonhuman agents. The word anthropomorphism derives from Greek and, literally translated, means humanlike (ánthrpos) in shape or form (morphos). In our daily lives, we do not have different languages to describe humans versus nonhumans. Therefore, humanlike characte...

Two studies identified three major sources of self-esteem: benevolence, merit, and bias. Individuals may report having high self-esteem because: (a) they have a positive attributional style, perceiving themselves and others positively (i.e., high benevolence); (b) they have significant accomplishments (i.e., high merit); and/or (c) they have an ove...

The stereotype content model (SCM) proposes potentially universal principles of societal stereotypes and their relation to social structure. Here, the SCM reveals theoretically grounded, cross-cultural, cross-groups similarities and one difference across 10 non-US nations. Seven European (individualist) and three East Asian (collectivist) nations (...

The authors examined the effects of exposure to foreign cultural environments and symbols on decision making among European Americans. Although European Americans predicted change less frequently than East Asians did (Pilot Study A), European Americans anticipated greater change when primed with East Asian culturally-laden locations (Pilot Study B...

Self-enhancement is the biasing of one's view of oneself in a positive direction. The brain correlates of self-enhancement remain unclear though it has been reported that the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) may be important for producing self-enhancing responses. Previous studies have not examined whether the neural correlates of self-enhancement d...

Four studies implemented a componential approach to assessing self-enhancement and contrasted this approach with 2 earlier ones: social comparison (comparing self-ratings with ratings of others) and self-insight (comparing self-ratings with ratings by others). In Study 1, the authors varied the traits being rated to identify conditions that lead to...

Animal studies once pervaded the field of social psychology, but over the last half century focus on this topic has faded. Here we argue that animal studies can still usefully contribute to several areas of social psychology. Two studies implemented a new cross-species comparative approach to compare human-to-human perceptions with human-to-dog per...

In geology, the "missing link" popularly names a transitional fossil that fills an evolutionary gap between life forms, especially between apes and humans. In social psychology, Heider and Simmel (1944) demonstrated that humans are not the only targets perceived to be agents; people are ready to impute human characteristics even to geometric figure...

The present study explored self-perceptions and meta-stereotypes along two dimensions, individuation and sociability, within a sample of Asian American and European American students. For both ethnic groups, meta-stereotypes in dimensions of individuation and sociability appear to be exaggerated forms of self-perceptions along these dimensions. Bot...

Considerable research has focused on overly positive self-perceptions (self-enhancement), and yet little is known about the underlying neural mechanisms. The present study sought to assess the neural correlates of self-enhancement by applying Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) to three brain regions. Twelve participants rated their best friend...

When interest in self-esteem exploded in the 1980s, many longitudinal studies were already under way and thus did not administer self-esteem measures. Consequently, not much is known about the developmental course of self-esteem during adulthood. In order to facilitate life-span research using existing longitudinal studies, a new self-esteem scale...

The Stereotype Content Model hypothesizes anti-Asian American stereotypes differentiating two dimensions: (excessive) competence and (deficient) sociability. The Scale of Anti-Asian American Stereotypes (SAAAS) shows this envious mixed prejudice in six studies. Study 1 began with 131 racial attitude items. Studies 2 and 3 tested 684 respondents on...

Deschamps and Doise’s (1978) classic crossed categorization hypothesis states that both category differentiation and intergroup bias should be reduced in crossed conditions (e.g., race × gender groups comprised of Asian females, Asian males, White females, and White males) compared to simple conditions, where people vary on just one social category...

Two studies examined consistency and agreement in behavior ratings and causal attributions. In Study 1, participants (N = 280) engaged in a series of getting-acquainted conversations in one of 3 communication media (face-to-face, telephone, computer mediated); in Study 2, participants (N = 120) engaged in a competitive group task. In both studies,...

Self-enhancement bias has been studied from 2 perspectives: L. Festinger's (1954) social comparison theory (self-enhancers perceive themselves more positively than they perceive others) and G. W. Allport's (1937) self-insight theory (self-enhancers perceive themselves more positively than they are perceived by others). These 2 perspectives are theo...

This research offers a blueprint for how a cross-species comparative approach can be realized empirically. In a single design, parallel procedures and instruments were used in 2 species, dogs (Canis familiaris) and humans (Homo sapiens), to test whether personality differences exist and can be judged in dogs as accurately as in humans. Personality...

A longitudinal study examined the interplay of identity negotiation processes and diversity in small groups of master's of business administration (MBA) students. When perceivers formed relatively positive impressions of other group members, higher diversity predicted more individuation of targets. When perceivers formed relatively neutral impressi...

Changes in the gender-stereotypic perceptions of men and women were examined in a prospective study of MBA study groups (N = 253). At the outset of the semester, group members perceived women, as compared to men, as more "communal" (other-focused) but equally "agentic" (self-focused). Over the subsequent 9 weeks, gender-stereotypic perceptions of w...

Normative personality change over 40 years was shown in 2 longitudinal cohorts with hierarchical linear modeling of California Psychological Inventory data obtained at multiple times between ages 21-75. Although themes of change and the paucity of differences attributable to gender and cohort largely supported findings of multiethnic cross-sectiona...

Theories of adult development all agree that adulthood is a time of important changes in goals, resources, and coping. Yet, impressed with the rank-order stability of individual differences in personality, many researchers interested in personality traits and personality assessment doubt that personality changes in meaningful and systematic ways du...

The authors outline a strategy for introducing a Western psychological construct into a different culture. A series of three studies tested how the construct of individuation functions in a collectivist culture. It was hypothesized that the original one-factor model of individuation would not be sufficient to capture the meaning of individuating be...

The tendency to self-enhance has been related to a host of beneficial psychological outcomes (Taylor & Brown, 1988), although some negative social consequences have also been identified (Colvin et al., 1995, Paulhus, 1998). One operationalization of self-enhancement is derived by subtracting the rater's evaluations of others from his or her self-ra...

The first part of the study confirmed an additive effect of the newly proposed construct of relationship harmony to self-esteem in predicting life satisfaction across student samples from the United States and Hong Kong. As predicted from the dynamics of cultural collectivism, the relative importance of relationship harmony to self-esteem was great...